These results have clear implications for understanding operational decision making as it occurs in situ and suggest a need for future guidance and training to acknowledge the role of reflexive processes.

Every year, incident management teams (IMTs) coordinate the response to hundreds of emergency events across Australasia. Larger scale emergencies such as a storms, floods, wildfires, oil spills and chemical explosions can place a lot of pressure on an IMT. Non‐technical skills play a central role in the performance of these teams. This article reviewed the broader non‐technical skills (NTS) literature before focusing on the NTS required for emergency management. It was found that most NTS frameworks share four to five common skill categories, although there were greater differences at the element and behavioural marker level. A variety of issues were identified in the literature that highlight that emergency management is very different from other domains where NTS systems have been developed. The literature on NTS in conjunction with this set of issues was used to develop a proposed NTS framework for emergency IMTs. This framework comprises 7 skill categories (i.e. communication, coordination, cooperation, decision‐making, situation awareness, leadership and coping, stress and fatigue management). The 7 skills can be further delineated into 16 elements and 44 behavioural markers. The framework provides a prototype that can form the basis for further research in this area.

Non-technical skills in high-reliability industries include decision making, interpersonal communication and personal resilience. It has been argued that these skills are key to effective performance, safety and welfare. However, there is no agreed upon set of such skills or formal means to identify and assess them for incident commanders in the UK fire and rescue service (FRS). The aim of this research was to identify the non-technical skills that underpin effective incident command in the UK FRS, and to develop a behavioural marker system that captures these skills. Our research assessed the current range of training offered in non-technical skills across the UK FRS, and identified the non-technical skills of incident command within the UK FRS through interviews with incident commanders, and workshops with subject-matter experts. The six non-technical skills were: assertive, effective and safe leadership; effective decision making and planning; interpersonal communication; personal resilience; situational awareness; and teamwork and interoperability. A bespoke behavioural marker system, called THINCS, was developed with exemplary behaviours for each skill.

Objective To understand how firefighters’ use of rules (i.e., standard operating procedures [SOPs]) and deliberative decision making (i.e., operational discretion [OD]) interacts with acute stress. Background Current operational guidance for UK firefighters combines the provision of SOPs, for routine incidents, with the use of OD, under prescribed conditions (e.g., when there is a risk to human life). However, our understanding of the use of SOPs and OD is limited. Methods Incident commanders (ICs; n = 43) responded to simulated emergency incidents, which either licensed the use of OD or required use of a SOP. Video footage of IC behavior was used to code their response as involving a SOP or OD, while levels of acute stress were assessed using a blood-based measure and self-report. Results ICs were less likely to use OD selectively in the simulated emergency incident that licensed its use than in the one for which use of an SOP was appropriate; IC command level did not affect this pattern of results; and the incident that licensed OD resulted in more acute stress than the incident that required use of a SOP. Conclusion SOPs and OD were not used in the manner prescribed by current operational guidance in simulated emergency incidents. Application These results suggest that firefighter training in SOPs and OD should be augmented alongside personal resilience training, given the impact of stress on health and wellbeing, but also to improve the deployment of SOPs and OD under stress.